Do you even pray, bro? - Mary's Peak, OR


This past week, my buddies and I hiked up to one of my favorite places around Oregon: Mary's Peak. The view up there is always amazing. Add to that sunset, and it's a gorgeous view.

Anyway, so we hiked up and were sitting there and enjoying the view. After jamming and singing a bit (there's a trend when I'm with friends...), one of my friends brought up a really interesting point.

"You know how we can easily sing and play worship songs for a half hour or even an hour? Why does it seem to be so hard to do that when we pray?"

We discussed a bit about prayer and faith, and he then suggested that we pray for 15 minutes. He started a stopwatch on his phone, and we started to pray.

And boy. That was an experience.

To be honest, in preparation for the hike, I thought that I was going end up writing about how the hike is worth it, and how in the Christian life it takes effort but the end result is worth the pain blah blah blah. You know.

But, God, in His infinite awesomeness, decided that something cooler than just an awesome view was waiting for us.

We prayed. About all sorts of stuff. We prayed for our schools, our town, our future, our friends. We prayed about ourselves. We gave glory to God.

I think it's common to hear about those people who can sit down and pray for hours on end, and immediately think "Wow. That's cool and all, but I'll never be able to do that." But, the thing is, prayer really isn't that complicated. It's a way that we can go to God, and talk to Him. That's it. We get to talk to our Creator. Our Father.

If you look at Acts and the story of the early church, you see that they pray together. A LOT. In fact, they do it so often that it can be easy to miss, to pass over. However, in many of the stories from Acts, the 'big' events are preceded by prayer. Not just any prayer, but communal prayer.

Now, personal prayer is important: Jesus established that when He would go out alone in the morning to pray and be with God (Mark 1:35). Yet, as seen in Acts, we don't just pray by ourselves. We pray with each other, for each other.

So, that day, we prayed. We watched the sun slowly set on the Valley and we prayed. When we finished up, my friend checked his phone: 20 minutes and 35 seconds, a solid 5 minutes over our 'goal'. Yet, I think to all of us, the time really didn't matter. What did matter is that we prayed together, as brothers and sisters in Christ, going to our loving Father, talking to Him, knowing that He was there, and heard every single word.

Matthew 18:20 (ESV)
For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dissecting the Gospel of Marriage and the Reality of Singleness

Image
  "Marriage is the greatest blessing in life" Christians LOVE talking about marriage and if you're in college, you're practically drowning in relationship talk. It's the tea. You're drowning in the tea. When you meet someone who you have not seen for a while, after the standard pleasantries of "what have you been up to?" have been exchanged, the topic invariably goes to "how's the love life?" At least once a school year (if not once a term), there is a relationship talk. Some older Christians seem set on trying to set you up. For as much as we sing love songs to God, we seem too often to be equally focused on finding that someone "special" we can sing love songs to as well. When we leave the halls of our church and go into the secular world, marriage and relationships are shoved into our face as well. Any dissection of the music charts reveals song after song about love. We all know that it's important and we should want ...
Read more

Stuck Between Worlds

Image
    Man what a year. First WW3 memes with Australia on fire, then a pandemic which quite literally changed life as we know it. Add to that a summer of racial tensions and then a crazy election, life in America has been a mixture of both really exciting, really stressful, and really boring. But tonight, I'm here to talk about my experience with being an American, being Asian, being a Christian, and often just feeling like I don't truly 'fit in'. To start off, let's go all the way back before I was born, back to the 70s. During that decade, my parents immigrated over to the US. Being fairly young (before their teen years), most of their main education was in the US as opposed to other's who came to the US for college or post-grad opportunities. Fast forward to March 19th, 1999, Dennis and Angela had a son, and the world would never be the same.    I'm technically first generation, but part of me feels second generation. I have a lot of first-gen Asian American...
Read more

The World Around Us - Oregon State Fair

Image
For someone who has lived less than an hour away from the Oregon State Fairgrounds, the past 18 years you'd think that I would have been to the state fair prior to this year. But NOPE! This year was my first year. To be honest, fairs really aren't my thing. My parents have ingrained in me a wise fear of fair rides, and the food is always overpriced (and also incredibly fattening). On that note, I was able to get an elephant ear that was a solid 18 inches in diameter all the way around. But anyway, fairs aren't my thing. The only reason why I went up this year was for KING & COUNTRY was playing and admission was only $2. That's a deal that you can't pass up. Anyway, the concert was pretty great. They were awesome and I think most everyone there had a great time. However, during the entire concert part of my mind was thinking about everything outside the amphitheater. Everyone. I think at least a solid 90% of the people who went were Christians. I thin...
Read more